This invention relates to apparatus for recording and/or reproducing music and the like, and is more especially directed to the encoding, sensing, storage, and playback of data related to the title, artist, playing time, track, and location of music or other selections on a magnetic tape, such as a standard audio cassette tape.
Until now, the best information that could be obtained about magnetically recorded music (i.e., taped music) was the track location, obtained by sensing the location of an unrecorded or silent break between recorded segments or "tracks". This technique is sometimes referred to as break sensing or gap sensing. No information concerning the content of the recorded music or other selection was available to the user. Also, the break sensing technique can sometimes be "fooled" by a pianissimo passage or tacet segment of a recorded selection. This break sensing or gap sensing technique is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,301,482 to Trevithick.
An alternative approach is the "smart cassette" system, such as is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,388,644 to Staar. In that technique, a magnetic tape cassette has a semiconductor chip incorporated into the cassette housing, and this chip stores information concerning the tape. These systems, however, are intended mostly to calculate and indicate the tape position and amount of tape remaining more accurately than the mechanical tape sensing systems that they replace. Furthermore, the "smart cassette" system cannot be used to advantage with ordinary tape cassettes, because the pertinent data are stored on the semiconductor chip, and not on the tape itself.